Linking Well-Being to Leisure Participation and Time Spent on Social Media Technologies : An Extended Hybrid Choice Model Approach

Technology use has had a major impact on the way people conduct their lives and has changed significantly involvement in leisure activities: the types of activities, the locations where these activities are pursued, their durations, and the associated feelings. This paper offers a modeling framework to investigate the connections between social media technology and leisure activity participation with the objective to get a better understanding of how individuals might consider the happiness of using media technology for leisure. A hybrid choice model framework is proposed, where a simultaneous equation model formulation links psychological indicators to activity participation and time use decisions. Different from previous studies, the psychological factors are correlated with time use decisions; moreover, a new iterative simulated maximization estimation method is also proposed to accommodate possible endogeneity bias in the model system. A simulation experiment shows that the estimation method proposed produces consistent and unbiased results. A real case study, based on data extracted from the American Time Use Survey, sheds new light on the complex relationship between well-being indicators, activity participation and duration in the context of social media technology use for leisure